The fundamental principle of IRCAM is to encourage productive interaction among scientific research, technological developments, and contemporary music production. Since its establishment in 1977, this initiative has provided the foundation for the institute’s activities. One of the major issues is the importance of contributing to the renewal of musical expression through science and technology. Conversely, ...

IRCAM is an internationally recognized research center dedicated to creating new technologies for music. The institute offers a unique experimental environment where composers strive to enlarge their musical experience through the concepts expressed in new technologies.

In parallel to its fundamental missions of research and creation, IRCAM is committed to sharing its knowledge and know-how, its technologies with the general public. Cutting-edge research and diffusion of innovations, an international reference for education and the democratization of artistic practices are the driving forces behind the institute’s educational activities.

At the center of societal and economic concerns combining culture and information technologies, the current research at IRCAM is seen by the international research community as a reference for interdisciplinary projects on the sciences and technologies for sound and music, constantly exposed to society’s new needs and uses.

The fundamental principle of IRCAM is to encourage productive interaction among scientific research, technological developments, and contemporary music production. Since its establishment in 1977, this initiative has provided the foundation for the institute’s activities. One of the major issues is the importance of contributing to the renewal of musical expression through science and technology. Conversely, ...

IRCAM is an internationally recognized research center dedicated to creating new technologies for music. The institute offers a unique experimental environment where composers strive to enlarge their musical experience through the concepts expressed in new technologies.

In parallel to its fundamental missions of research and creation, IRCAM is committed to sharing its knowledge and know-how, its technologies with the general public. Cutting-edge research and diffusion of innovations, an international reference for education and the democratization of artistic practices are the driving forces behind the institute’s educational activities.

At the center of societal and economic concerns combining culture and information technologies, the current research at IRCAM is seen by the international research community as a reference for interdisciplinary projects on the sciences and technologies for sound and music, constantly exposed to society’s new needs and uses.

Installation/Concert for 5 musicians, electronic, stage and video system

Welcome to Pyramiden! It’s here, at 78 degrees north, in Spitzberg a couple hundred kilometers from the North Pole that composer Jérôme Combier and video artist Pierre Nouvel have brought us. A ghost town nestled in a fjord, shadowed by a pyramid-like mountain. Pyramiden is one of the last vestiges of an urban utopia: a mining city organized to be ideal, true to almost every principle of communism. It’s was the “most perfect communist town in the world”, paradoxically located west of the Iron Curtain until the fall of the USSR and the end of all mining activity left it, abandoned, to the test of the elements, in dereliction.

It is this phantom of a town that Campo santo, title borrowed from W. G. Sebald, shows us. Between a concert and a sound and visual installation, it is above all, a hauntological work (concept coined by Jacques Derrida with his Spectres of Marx: a work built on traces of the past) drawn on sounds and images captured in situ, in a gangue of frozen time.

Electronic Challenges

Presented as an open installation in 5 successive tableaux interspersed with short interludes, electronics hold a central role in Campo Santo, particularly from a dramaturgical point of view. With fragments of speech in English, Russian, or Norwegian recorded during the two artists’ trips, the work also conveys fragments of texts by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, or Auguste Blanqui, to question utopias connected to Pyramiden. The electronics also offer a lyrical counterpoint to the instrumental ensemble (two percussionists, an accordion, a guitar, and a flute), notably via a virtual and ghostly chorus. Lastly, the computers make it possible to have a sound reconstruction of the places visited – we can hear the piano of Pyramiden, the north most piano in the world in the reconstructed acoustics of the concert hall. Campo santo: a mausoleum of deserted human venues and Verlaine’s “dear voices that have been stilled”.

Biographies

Composer (born 1971)At the age of 19 Jérôme Combier decided to learn music. While studying musicology at the université de Saint-Denis he also studied guitar, after meeting Hacène Larbi and Emmanuel Nunes at the Conservatoire...